The Night for a Musician is a Lonely Time: A Story About Nothing · 8:23am Mar 25th, 2017
https://www.fimfiction.net/story/368138/the-night-for-a-musician-is-a-lonely-time
This story presented itself to me as a simple challenge: write a story about nothing!
"The Night For a Musician" is somewhat different than most of the other stuff I've written this year, mostly because it's the first thing I've written this year. The first couple of months of 2017 were a creative wash, and I had to motivate myself to write by challenging myself to do something I've never done before.
Upon reading it, you might say it shares similarities with other of my more recent stories, and I think you'd be right! A clear, more definitive style is emerging from my scraps and doodles--something akin to what you might read in "Artist Among Animals" or "Variations on Trust," two stories whose style I like to believe I own. In regards to this new direction, let me say that lucidity is not my objective here. I've moved past trying to make perfectly accurate descriptions, and instead I'm trying to capture moments of color and detail as they might appear to the characters. Think impressionistic painters. The objective here is not to create a perfectly-detailed and universally-understood story. The objective is to shroud what a character might see in sheets of light and haze and distortion, until only a vague outline is left. Nothing seems real on those old canvases. No definition. No solid shapes. I guess that's the "nothing" I was going for.
In my mind, "The Night For a Musician" is simply a darker color of the palette I've been using. The challenge I made myself--"write a story about nothing"--didn't really pan out (though I can't reasonably expect to publish a blank document to fimfic in the name of artistic experimentation)--but instead I got a story about Octavia traveling through a city that once fooled her into believing it was home. Now she's just there for the gigs. Now she just roams.
> This story presented itself to me as a simple challenge: write a story about nothing!
They can teach you how to do that in any college creative writing or MFA program.